The present invention pertains to a power supply system with at least one rechargeable battery, with a charging and monitoring unit, and with load current outputs and a charging feed input.
An auxiliary power supply system is known from FR-A-2,220,211, in which a rechargeable battery and a charging unit together with means for monitoring the operating state of the power system are housed in a multi-part housing. So that this auxiliary power supply system can provide help in the case of a breakdown in devices whose batteries are depleted, load current outputs are provided on the auxiliary power supply system as well as a mains connection so that the battery system's own auxiliary system can be charged via the mains and the charging unit provided in the housing.
A portable power supply system for battery-operated or accumulator-operated devices for which no nearby mains connection is available is described in GB-A-2,028,022. In the power supply system described therein, a battery, a charging unit, and a monitor for indicating the operating state of the system are again provided in and a multi-part housing; a mains connection is also provided so that the charging unit mentioned can charge the system battery.
As in the case of batteries and charging/monitoring units used separately, the problem of warranty claims also exists when these portable battery and charging/monitoring units are combined into a unit in a common multi-part housing. For the producer of these batteries, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to test batteries which have been returned in defective condition within the warranty period for fulfillment of the warranty performance claims to determine whether or not the batteries have in fact been used properly, a condition normally required for the satisfaction of the claims mentioned. The larger the battery systems being used, the more acute this problem is becoming, which is in line with the current trend toward replacing more and more fuel-powered systems with electrically powered ones, such as vehicles with electric motors as the drive source.